


Shame Would Not Hold Down Your Eyes

by coffeeandoranges



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Cunnilingus, F/F, Fisting, Grief, Northern politics, Post-Series, Trauma, Trauma-Induced Hypersexuality, heed the tags, mostly show canon although who knows what is 'canon' anymore, top! Sansa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 08:27:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19719955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: “Lemon cakes and pretty women,” she says under her breath. Her tastes are becoming well-known in the north, then.It frightens her.OR, Sansa Stark balances her new role as Queen in the North with her love for women.





	Shame Would Not Hold Down Your Eyes

> _I want to say something but shame_
> 
> _prevents me—_
> 
> _yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things_
> 
> _and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say,_
> 
> _shame would not hold down your eyes_
> 
> _but rather you would speak about what is just—_

— Sappho, translation from _If Not, Winter_ by Anne Carson

* * *

One of Sansa’s first rulings proves to be her only controversial one. She asks Bran to hold a state funeral for Lady Margaery, and for the men and women of House Tyrell also burned to death by Lannister wildfire. Her request to Bran is an expression of private grief, but holds public meaning as well. She hopes that creature Bronn, who now holds Highgarden, will be forced to attend. Men will interpret the funeral as a rebuke to Lannister power. 

But women, she knows-- a certain kind of woman-- could view it differently. 

\--

She doesn’t attend herself, though she wants to; she has duties in the north. 

Lady Margaery, the woman she knew-- the girl really, they were little more than girls then-- is nothing but ash and dust. 

\--

Sansa knew Margaery for a single candlelit night in King’s Landing, back when she was only a girl. She remembers it well: her shaking legs, the silk-sheeted luxury of her bed in the Maidenvault, her hungry mouth, red and stinging from their kisses, Margaery’s breath on her neck and cunt. _Sweet girl_ , Margaery called her. Even then Sansa knew she was only one of many in Lady Margaery’s retinue. 

The memory stays with her all the same. 

It returned during her wedding nights, and nights that were no wedding at all. If it did not allow her to quite endure men’s drunken lust and cruelty-- some things were not endurable-- at least it permitted her to leave her body, to revisit a time when another person’s affections were desired. 

If it could not save Sansa, even if Margaery herself could not be saved, the memory of Margaery salvaged something inside of her. 

Whatever that was, it lives in her still. 

\--

\--

It starts with the serving girls. 

The first is Myla, a kitchen wench, a tiny thing with dark blonde hair and eyes the color of clear water. 

Sansa initiates friendly conversation-- she sees the girl laugh, she doesn’t miss the sweet blush in her cheeks-- and invites her to her chambers that night.

She gives Myla one of her old gowns to wear. It is overlong on the girl’s small frame, but setting that aside, she is as stunning as any highborn woman wearing it, just as Sansa hoped she would be. Sansa sits in her great-chair by the fire with her legs crossed while she watches the serving-girl dress, drinking a glass of wine, and for a moment reminds herself of Cersei. 

_No, Cersei would never be this kind or patient._

Sansa pushes the thought of the dead queen from her mind. 

Myla comes towards her, her face pale and her eyes bright, and Sansa strokes her cheek. 

“How beautiful on you,” she says of the dress. “You are lovely.” 

“Thank you, Your Grace,” says the girl. “Your Grace is so kind. I don’t know how I can repay you.”

“Keep the dress,” Sansa says, her tone indulgent. “I would ask for your service tonight. Would you like that?”

The girl’s cheeks are aflame. Her hands work nervously on the fabric of her dress. 

But when she speaks, her voice doesn’t waver. “I would like that, Your Grace.”

“Come, my girl,” Sansa says, and the girl kneels before her. 

Sansa spreads her legs. 

As the serving-girl presses her face between Sansa’s thighs, Sansa lets out a long sigh of pleasure, that seems to come from deep within her chest, something long-denied. 

The girl’s tongue is nothing as clever as Margaery’s, of course, but her ministrations are sweet, and heat gathers in her stomach, and then Sansa feels herself spilling into the other girl’s mouth as she grips Myla’s shoulder to steady herself. 

She offers the girl a bowl of water and a cloth to clean her face when they are through.

“Thank you, sweet girl,” says Sansa. 

The look on Myla’s face is nothing short of worship as Sansa presses the gown into the girl’s hands. They are raw, her hands, from doing the washing. 

“Will you have need of me again?” she asks. 

Sansa considers her. “Perhaps.”

\--

She does not call upon Myla again. Although Sansa had offered her a choice, even though the girl had slyly asked to return to Sansa’s chambers, there was something about her shyness, her maiden’s innocence, that gives Sansa pause. 

She’d rarely had cause to be mindful of her own power in the past, not as the plaything she once was. But she was hardly powerless now, and that demanded a certain responsibility. 

When she invited the girl to her chambers, had Myla heard it as a request or a demand? She hopes it was the former. 

\--

\--

The next girl does not give her pause as Myla did. 

She is a black-haired maid attached to the Hornwoods, who are visiting Sansa at court. She bears a passing resemblance to Shae, a fact which clenches Sansa’s gut. No doubt Shae is laid in a shallow grave somewhere, dead, like so many Sansa knew in the war, by the hand of some Lannister.

But the resemblance is only superficial. This girl laughs easily--her features are strong and her jawline sharp. (Now Sansa thinks of Theon Greyjoy’s sister Asha.) Yet her body is lush and womanly -- Sansa never liked a woman who had the look of a man -- and she stares at Sansa with a cool boldness. 

“My name is Betha,” she says when Sansa asks her. 

“Like Black Betha of the Targaryens,” says Sansa.

“Aye, my queen, my family named me after her,” Betha says. 

Clearly gathering her courage, she says, “You really are as beautiful as they say you are.”

Sansa smiles. “You thought I wouldn’t be?”

“Highborn ladies usually aren’t,” says Betha. 

Years ago, Sansa would have been speechless at that, but she has heard Arya and Jon speak warmly of the smallfolk many times by now, and it is not years ago either. 

“That’s why they write so many songs about highborn ladies, Betha,” says Sansa. “True beauty needs no song to prove itself.”

The grin that spreads across Betha’s face is satisfying. 

“Would you visit me in my chambers tonight?” says Sansa. 

She can hear the boldness in her own voice as well. 

“It would be my pleasure, Your Grace,” Betha says, her mouth quirked with mischief.

\--

\--

  


Betha serves Sansa many times-- as many as they can arrange before the Hornwoods return to the Sheepshead Hills.

The first night Betha licks her open with practiced ease, and crooks two fingers in Sansa’s wet cunt to finish her off a second time, a third time, and at the end of it, it is Sansa who is trembling, Sansa who extends her hand to Betha and pulls the other girl close to her chest to nestle inside the hollow of her shoulder. 

“You are,” Sansa says, “Very good at that.”

Betha preens under Sansa’s chin; they sleep together the length of the night.

The next day, Sansa ends a tedious council meeting early and calls for Betha in her rooms, and they fuck in the mid-afternoon light. This time it is Sansa’s fingers and tongue that serve Betha, Betha whose violent cries (Sansa fears) could wake the dead. 

Sansa claps a hand over Betha’s mouth. 

“Don’t shriek,” she says. “You are in the chambers of a queen.”

“So I am,” Betha says roughly, her eyes wild with pleasure. 

Sansa kisses her quiet until the last of her orgasm leaves her. 

\--

\--

“I will miss you,” Betha says before the Hornwoods depart three days later. 

“I will send for you,” Sansa says. This time, she thinks she might mean it. It would have to be done carefully, with discretion. There are men who seek her hand, who will study her reputation. Someday, she might say yes to one of them. 

But not yet. 

Betha looks over her shoulder as House Hornwood rides from Winterfell, and then she vanishes, the sight of her black hair fading into the white fog. 

\--

\--

The next girl is a wildling, part of a delegation Jon sent south to receive Winterfell’s hospitality. 

  


The girl has red hair like many of the northern clans, and at first Sansa presumes she is disinterested because of the babe in her arms, which she dotes on. 

She is not beautiful, but there is something about her that draws the eye-- perhaps those unruly red curls, perhaps her slim, angular face. She is small but robust, as if from raiding, like so many of her sisters. 

Sansa puts the girl out of her mind until she begins to look at her in return, giving Sansa shy little glances over dinner in the evenings. 

They have some time to eye one another-- the wildlings will sup with House Stark for whole of the next moon’s turn-- and Sansa supposes that women of the Free Folk prefer to approach rather than be approached, so Sansa waits. 

In the meantime she has plenty to busy herself with, as the northerners go through food and ale like none other, and keeping the kitchens stocked is a challenge. 

It is after one of those dinners, where Sansa curses the northern appetite and makes a note to order casks of ale in the morning, when the girl approaches Sansa at last and says her name is Magga. 

“Magga of the North,” says Sansa, tasting the name on her tongue. “What can I do for you?” 

Magga looks around, her eyes narrowed with suspicion as though someone might be watching them, but the men are in their cups and the women tend their children. 

“Your Grace,” Magga says, attempting a clumsy curtsey. “I am here to ask you for something.”

Magga busies her hands as she tries, like the other girls before her, to find within herself the courage to speak plainly to the queen in the north. 

“They say you have an understanding of women,” Magga says at last. 

Sansa is court-trained and has an ear for the specifics of language. A line creases between her eyebrows. 

“ _They_ say,” Sansa echoes. “And who are they?”

Magga looks almost frightened. “A girl in the kitchens.”

Sansa’s shoulders relax. She must mean Myla, and Sansa will not begrudge Myla the right to talk about their encounter. Gossip from outside of Winterfell would have been more worrying.

“I’m sorry, Magga,” says Sansa. “Suspicion is a terrible habit I picked up in the court of King’s Landing. Please continue.”

Abashed but still brave, Magga says, slowly, “I have a problem that I think you could help me with.” 

_A problem._ That is a strange way of putting it. 

“Please come to my chambers tonight,” says Sansa. “I hope I can help you, Magga. I will help in any way I can.”

\--

Magga arrives several hours later, just when Sansa has decided she won’t come. She is blowing out the candles and banking the fire when the knock comes at the door to her bedchambers. 

“Come in,” Sansa calls out. 

The door creaks open, and in the sliver of the doorway Magga’s strange elfish face appears. 

When she enters, she’s shivering like a leaf. 

“I want you to take me to your bed,” says Magga baldly, immediately. It is a declaration, not a question, and yet it couldn’t be more incongruous with her frightened expression. It makes Sansa’s jaw drop open slightly. 

But there are spots of color in Magga’s cheeks, and her fists clench, and she is not finished. 

“Please, you must help me,” the wildling girl says. “Please, I do not tremble because of you, but because of-- I have not been able to lay with my husband since-- since-- and I thought if it was you, if it was a woman, if it was someone who made me feel _safe_ \--”

Sansa sits down heavily in her great-chair, letting her wrists dangle over the arms. 

Her mind working, she thinks she understands Magga, what the girl is asking for, but all the same-- 

“Do I make you feel safe, Magga?” 

Magga stares at her as if this is the stupidest question she’s ever heard. 

“ _Everyone_ feels safe around you, Your Grace. Your castle is warm, your people are fed, they say the war ended because of you, they call you the savior of the north, and-- and you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life, I didn’t know the gods could make a woman like you.”

Sansa’s cheeks go warm at her praise. And yet--

“Do you truly want to lay with me?” Sansa asks, still jarred by her behavior.

Magga nods. 

“Come then,” says Sansa, and when Magga begins to undress, Sansa lays a hand on hers. 

“Not tonight,” says Sansa. “I would like to hold you first, if I could.”

Magga slips her shoulder back into her dress, her eyes large and dark in the firelight. She nods again, slowly, and they lay together in bed, Sansa taking her into her arms. 

Her fingers play with Magga’s red curls, and she begins to croon softly, a southron song, the one she heard on the night Lady Margaery made love to her. 

Magga’s body is warm in the night, and Sansa is glad for someone to hold. 

\--

  


They sleep this way the next night, and the night after.

Then one night Magga turns to face her, and places Sansa’s hand on her hip. 

“I want you,” she says. “I want your hands on me, I want your tongue in me, and I want to get fucked by a queen before I leave this earth.”

This close to Sansa, her pupils are wide and dark, and Sansa licks her lips, staring into those dark eyes, their breath mingling in their shared bed. 

“Alright,” says Sansa. 

\--

\-- 

  


They begin with a kiss. 

Sansa splays on a hand on Magga’s slender back and pulls her closer as they sit facing each other. Magga’s lips are chapped, her skin is warm, and her heart is beating fast in her neck as Sansa lips down the side of her face and down her neck, her tongue landing in the hollow at her throat. 

Magga gasps. 

Sansa pauses. “Are you alright?”

“I’m alright,” Magga says. Her eyes are shut tight. “Don’t stop, please.”

Sansa kisses her more gently on the neck. 

“You are beautiful,” she whispers into the girl’s ear, knowing it is what she needs to hear. 

A smile appears on Magga’s face. 

“You are the most beautiful,” she whispers back. “The most beautiful woman in the world.”

Sansa grins wickedly and nibbles on Magga’s ear. 

Another gasp-- and Magga’s body twitches like a current changing course. 

“You like that,” says Sansa. 

She tongues the inside of Magga’s ear and feels the girl’s body shivering in pleasure against hers, then she works her way back to Magga’s neck, to the constellation of freckles there, and nips at every one-- each one another gasp, another shudder. 

Sansa’s hands unlace Magga’s dress behind her back--it falls open to reveal her round breasts--while she explores Magga’s body with her tongue and teeth. 

She finds small hard pink nipples, the sweet roll of flesh at her waist. 

“Fuck me please,” says Magga. “I want your hands--”

So Sansa takes her in hand and flips her over, so that she lies beneath Sansa, staring up into her eyes. There is an intake of breath from the other girl, and no trace of the shivering ghost who entered her rooms three nights ago. 

“Are you still alright?” asks Sansa. 

“Yes,” comes the reply. 

With one last glance at Magga’s face, Sansa takes one of those breasts into her mouth, her tongue rolling over the hard nipple to tease it. Magga whimpers and her hands clutch at the sheets. With another lazy grin, Sansa lets her nipple graze the edge of her teeth, which provokes a moan from the wildling girl. 

“Yes,” says Magga, her hand over her eyes--as if lost in the sensation caused by Sansa’s mouth. “Harder.”

Sansa considers this instruction, and then withdraws her mouth from the nipples to consider the rest of her breasts. 

Milk-white and freckled, Sansa has never seen anything look more sweet. 

She sucks at the tender flesh around the nipples, swirls her tongue down the sweaty curve of her body. Magga begins to make a noise that sounds like keening, a soft whine that makes Sansa’s hair stand on end. 

Sansa’s hands dig into Magga’s flesh as the girl begins to buck her hips towards her. Kissing down her waist, she pauses before the thatch of reddish brown hair to kiss it, and she opens the girl’s sex with a finger. 

Her opening is already slick, her clitoris swollen, and the latter is what draws Sansa’s attention the most-- so she takes her between her lips and begins to suck. 

Magga releases a wild cry and grips Sansa’s hair in her fist. “Sansa!” 

Sansa smiles against the girl’s wet cunt, fluid dripping into her nose. It is no matter though, not when Magga opens for her so fully.

“Sweet girl,” says Sansa, her mouth full of Magga’s come.

“Your hands--” Magga says urgently. 

There is a desperation to her begging now, as she comes closer to finish. 

“I want you inside me.”

Sansa would prefer to finish her with her mouth, but she sits up and does as Magga tells her. 

Her fingers fit easily inside, with room for a third. At the cue of Magga’s gasping, Sansa pushes her way inside, feeling the walls of her cunt stretch with every thrust of her hand. 

“Harder,” Magga begs her again. 

Sansa stops. 

“Are you alright? Truly?” 

Suddenly tears roll down the other girl’s face. 

“Keep going,” says Magga through her tears, her face red and contorted. “Harder, harder--”

Sansa can feel her own tears building behind her eyes, while she watches Magga struggle with her body, her memories--

_I want you inside me._

Gritting her teeth, Sansa thrusts rhymically, until drops of sweat fall from her body to Magga’s, until Magga rises beneath her, pressing them skin to skin, until it seems their bodies are almost one. 

Magga begins to close around her fingers. 

The wildling girl cries out one last time, and Sansa dives deeply, seeking the rough patch at the back of her cunt, and finding it, until Magga tightens like a vice around her wrist, and Magga screams out, and Sansa hears herself start to cry. 

With a terrible sound, like something breaking, Magga bursts into violent weeping, and collapses against Sansa’s chest. 

Sansa holds her as best as she can, weeping her own tears. 

“Thank you,” Magga says, in between breaths. “Thank you.”

“It is nothing.” 

Sansa’s throat has closed and all that comes out is a rasp. 

“I just wanted to forget him, Your Grace,” says Magga, and her dark eyes are staring behind Sansa, at something Sansa cannot see. 

“To forget his hands, his-- his cock inside me-- I wanted to _feel_ something again-- to be able to be touched without-- going back-- But the child is his-- and my-- my husband thinks me used--”

Sansa tries to think of words of comfort, but there is a scream building in the back of her throat.

“I didn’t fight hard enough,” says Magga miserably. 

“Yes, you did,” Sansa says hoarsely, cradling Magga to her chest. “Yes, you did.”

They sit for a while shivering and weeping, in the cold patch of Magga’s come, and Magga never comes to Sansa’s bed again, and Sansa does not seek her out, nor does she watch when the wildlings take their leave from the castle at Winterfell. 

  
  
  
  


\--

\--

After Magga leaves, the dreams begin-- the nightmares of men’s mouths and hands, tearing her open, night after night, and Sansa begins to hate Magga, truly hate her, for opening a door within Sansa that had been better left closed. 

In the long nights when she finds herself awake, avoiding sleep, she finds herself stitching a golden-green gown, and if her sleepless mind is allowed to drift, she imagines it is for Margaery. 

Oh, if she had been allowed to stay there, in that bed, _if I had known love, and pleasure, maybe it would be different now,_ Sansa thinks, _and I would be happy, and kind, and I wouldn’t grasp for lust, for release, for the nearest slick cunt._

But because she knows herself for a fool, she puts down her stitching, and she paces the halls of Winterfell like a ghost. 

She comes back to her bedchambers at dawn, and sleeps a few exhausted hours until her steward cannot make her excuses for her anymore. 

And then she is forced to wash, and dress, and rule. 

\--

\--

  


Then-- alone again in her chambers-- she pricks a finger stitching, and with blood welling on her finger, she thinks of each man who hurt her, each meaningless face rising in succession, and Sansa Stark picks up a glass vase, and hurls it against the wall, and shrieks as it shatters into a thousand bright pieces. 

  
  
  
  
  


\--

  
  
\--

She goes to the maester for a sleeping draught to put an end to it. A delegation from White Harbor is to arrive and Sansa is given to understand Lord Manderly is a clever man, though loyal, and she senses she will need her wits about her. 

  
  
  


\--

\--

  
  


\--

\--

  
  
  


The Manderlys arrive with thirty men and a train that rivals what the Lannisters brought to Winterfell twelve years before-- Sansa’s mind swims with memories-- but, as she reminds herself, Lord Wyman is not King Robert despite appearances. 

One of the banners that flutters in the spring breeze is of House Glover. To Sansa it represents a familiar man, one who held Deepwood Motte for her brother at some point during the previous ten long years. 

“Lord Glover,” she says, when receiving him in the train. “Your presence is a most welcome surprise.”

“Your Grace,” he says and inclines his head. She can tell he almost said _Lady Sansa,_ but caught himself just in time _._

Sansa will never tire of men correcting themselves. 

He goes on to explain he is recently married to one of Lord Manderly’s granddaughters, and they have a newborn daughter. He would introduce them, but his wife is asleep with the child. 

Sansa nods and assures him she can understand the demands of an infant-- though of course she can’t-- and goes to the great hall to receive Lord Wyman. 

\--

  


The entirety of Lord Wyman demands several chairs and Sansa curses herself for not foreseeing this. What she had heard of him was crude--she knew they called him Lord Too-Fat-to-Sit-a-Horse--but somehow she hadn’t expected the rumors of his size to be true, and here they are and he has been carried most of the distance from White Harbor, and Sansa cannot find him a proper chair. 

Finally one is produced that is large enough to accommodate him. 

Sansa swallows an instinctive disgust that rises to her throat. This man has served her family well, and besides, the emotion is better suited to the girl she was than the woman she is now. 

“My sincerest apologies, my lord,” she says. “We are still rebuilding Winterfell, and as you can see, we are lacking some of the necessities.”

Manderly seizes the moment with ready grace. 

“Would that I would have made as much progress in as little time,” he says. “If it had been White Harbor burned by dragonfire and besieged by an army of the dead.”

Sansa smiles to accept the compliment, taking in Lord Manderly, as well as the rest of his delegation: his son Wylis, Wylis’s blond, tired wife, and a few lesser lords, all getting on in their years. A woman’s green hair stands out like a flag in the group of grey old men. 

_Wylla_.

“This is my granddaughter,” says Manderly fondly. “The younger one.”

Wylla wears a grin that turns into a smirk when she meets Sansa’s eyes.

_Forward_ , Sansa finds herself thinking. _Too forward for a great hall._

Sansa is repelled and they move on to Galbert Glover, whom Sansa greeted in the yard during the arrival. 

She favors him with a kiss on the cheek and an embrace-- this was one of Robb’s cherished men, she can afford to lavish him with the affection of House Stark. He turns red beneath his greying hair.

“Let me finally introduce you to my lady wife, Wynafryd,” says Glover. “She woke up for the occasion.”

Wynafryd lifts an eyebrow at her husband and turns to Sansa. She is prettier than her sister, with her brown curls pulled back into an elegant braid. 

“Your Grace,” she says. “It is an honor. I am sorry I missed your presence in the yard earlier.”

“It is alright,” says Sansa. “I have heard you are recently a mother.”

_She_ is _young_ , Sansa thinks, almost her own age, and likely two dozen years younger than her lord husband. Yet if that fact bothers her, she wears it lightly. 

“Yes, we recently had a girl, Eawynn,” says Wynafryd, waving a hand. “We are grateful for the hospitality of Winterfell after our travel, and my lord husband and I have a gift for you.”

“As do I,” interjects Lord Manderly, and Wynafryd gives him the same look she shot her husband a few moments before, as if to say, _wait._

Wynafryd presses her gift into Sansa’s hands-- it is a pair of sleek riding gloves, soft leather trimmed with red fox fur. Sansa releases a breath involuntarily. 

“A token of the loyalty of House Glover,” says Wynafryd. “We are known for our leather work, as I am sure Your Grace knows.”

“They are beautiful,” she says. 

“I had hoped we could go riding together during our stay,” says Wynafryd. She gestures at Wylla. “Along with my sister.” 

Sansa takes in the gloves, and the girl with the green hair, and Lord Manderly behind her. 

“Of course,” she says. “Though I’m not much of a rider. That is my sister Princess Arya.”

She ignores the pain in her chest when she says Arya’s name.

“You seem like you would pick it up quite well,” says Wynafryd, and she is watching Sansa very closely behind her vivid blue-green eyes. 

\--

Lord Manderly presents his gifts as well, which include twin wooden engravings of the Stark wolf and the Tully trout, and casks of his finest wines, and a Myrish carpet worked in grey and white. 

It is overwhelming and Sansa has no time to puzzle out the meaning of each gift before she has to get ready for the welcome feast. 

\--

  


_It worries me_ , she thinks later that night at the feast. 

She has found suitable chairs for all the guests and even stood and raised a toast to Lord Manderly, wondering all the while why he has come. Her mind wanders to the riding gloves, the wine, and the carpet, and the wooden engravings. 

In Sansa’s experience, gifts like this do not come without a price. 

Lord Manderly seems to have some sort of demand. She wishes he would just come out with it, but knows from experience that it could take days or weeks for his true intentions to emerge. Until then, she will keep her eyes and ears open, and her mind alert. She barely touches the wine. 

It is a familiar anxiety, this one-- too familiar. If she didn’t know Manderly had only a granddaughter to give, she would think he was offering her his son’s hand in marriage. 

But one of Manderly’s sons is married, and the other died, like so many others in the north, at the same wedding from which her own mother and brother never returned. 

  


\--

  
  


Heavy rains keep them inside for the next few days. The Manderlys are easier to entertain than the wildlings, having brought their own wine and stores, which Sansa appreciates. But there is the problem of Wylla, who has made no secret of her interest.

Making a hasty retreat to her bed chambers to avoid the Manderly girl, she collides with one of her own house servants. 

It is Myla. 

Sansa freezes with shame at the sight of her. 

“I’m so sorry,” she tells the girl. She is not sure how long it has been, but she is already beginning to regret those days of abandon that followed her coronation.

Myla smiles and shakes her head. “No matter, Your Grace.”

“I’m sorry for everything, I meant to say,” says Sansa at last. The girl does not seem terrified as she once did, but she does seem _busy_ , and not up for a long conversation. But the apology comes from Sansa unbidden. 

Now Myla looks back at her, meeting her eyes this time, and the expression on her face is warm and gentle. 

“I’m not sorry, Your Grace,” she says. “I was glad to be of service to you.”

She blushes then, and covers her face with her hands as if stifling laughter. 

“To tell you the truth,” Myla tells her. “I learned a _lot_.”

Sansa smiles too, a weight in her heart lightened. “Oh?”

“Yes,” Myla says. “I’ve been-- practicing-- what you taught me with the stable girl.”

Now she does burst into giggles, and Sansa laughs as she realizes who Myla is talking about.

The stable girl is one of Brienne’s acolytes, left behind when the older woman returned to Tarth, and she has a rakish charm of a type that has never appealed to Sansa, but she knows many women are drawn to. 

“I’m glad you found someone to your liking,” Sansa says.

“No one can compare to Your Grace,” says Myla quickly. 

Sansa gives her hand a playful squeeze. 

“It’s alright,” she says. “I mean it. Congratulations, and I hope you two enjoy much happiness together.”

Myla’s eyes go teary. 

“Thank you, and I mean that,” she says. She looks back at Sansa once more before she hurries down the steps. “I never would have found her if it wasn’t for you.”

  


\--

  


Alone in her chambers, Sansa is working on the green-gold dress, when suddenly a wave of grief hits her, and she puts it aside. 

_Who I am making this for?_

Her body feels empty and ill. It seems silly, to pour so much time and effort into something that will never be worn. She supposes she could wear it herself. But that is not why she is making the dress, and she knows that now, she can’t fool herself anymore; she knows herself well. 

_You’re making a dress for a dead woman_ , a voice jeers inside of her, and Sansa is not sure whose it is. It sounds like her own but laced with Cersei’s contempt. 

_Oh, I am a fool to think that night meant anything to Margaery._

In her mind, Sansa knows there is a chance, that even if Margaery had lived, that it would have changed nothing, that she still would have landed here, alone, while Margaery married another husband and Sansa ruled the north. 

_Still the same pathetic girl, then_ , the voice sneers, and Sansa can’t disagree with it, not when she is clinging to the memory of someone who likely never loved her even when she was alive. 

In a fit of frustration, Sansa shoves the gown in the bottom of her chest, beside the Hound’s soiled cloak and the remains of other dreams that never quite panned out. 

  
  


\--

  
  
  


The rains move on, but they leave behind a heat and heavy vapor in the air that Sansa has not felt since she was a child: it is the first hot day of spring. It is warm, too warm for her taste, and the trails are muddy and the fields wet, but Sansa has promised the Manderlys a day of riding, and so they go out riding.

It is she, Wynafryd, and Wylla who sit three astride on her best destriers. Sansa expects Glover to join them, but he does not, leaving her alone with the women.

“I’ve never ridden such a fine creature,” says Wylla as they start out, patting her brown stallion with a gloved hand.

She has an ease in the saddle Sansa envies, as she struggles to guide her stallion into a trot.

“They are war horses, left behind by the Targaryen forces,” Sansa explains. “I would prefer a few less of these, to tell you the truth. We need plough-horses.”

Wylla tilts her head. “My grandfather has a few to trade.”

Sansa accepts the unspoken invitation. “I will have to speak to him, I suppose.”

Wylla uses this—the first words she has addressed to the girl since they arrived—as an opening, just as Sansa suspected she would. Within an hour she has used her agility as a rider to create distance between the two of them and her sister.

Her smile is charming, Sansa has to admit, but the girl has a habit of stuffing every silence full of words that irritates Sansa. Her comments—meaningless, ranging from one topic to the next—come out in a torrent that leaves no room for reply.

“You were not raised in the saddle, were you,” Wylla teases her in the middle of a lengthy monologue on her riding experience.

Sansa stiffens in her saddle. “No, I was not.”

“You’re a northwoman,” says Wylla incredulously. “What did they teach you in Winterfell, if not that?”

“I was only in Winterfell until I was eleven, my lady,” says Sansa. “Then my lord father was called to King’s Landing and I with him, and they executed him there.”

She smiles politely. 

“I was too occupied to learn to ride after that.”

At the look on Wylla’s face, Sansa knows she has won that round.

Descending the slope of the castle lands, they come to a place Sansa dimly remembers from years of extracting Arya from the fields for their lessons, a stream at the bottom of a hill.

“Let’s stop,” says Sansa. “There is a stream down there, and I’m quite hot, aren’t you?”

Sansa _is_ flushed from the heat, and appreciates the opportunity to dip her head and neck in the stream. They are close enough to winter the water is still cold, and it feels good trickling through her hair. They pause long enough for Wynafryd to catch up with them—too long for Wylla, who is back in the saddle almost immediately.

Lady Manderly is carrying a basket she didn’t have with her when they set off earlier. Under cover of showing it to her, she leans in close to Sansa’s ear.

“Just say the word, Your Grace, and I will call her off.”

“No need,” says Sansa. “I suspect she will leave on her own.”

True to Sansa’s prediction, Wylla teases them for being old ladies in the sun, then takes off with her horse, at a faster pace than Sansa would have kept up with.

“I am so sorry, Your Grace,” Lady Wynafryd says as soon as she is gone. “Our Wylla has always been a handful.”

Sansa leans back on the grass, propping herself up with an arm. 

“Oh, so you grew up with one of those as well?”

Wynafryd’s laugh is a pleasant sound, but Sansa appreciates the way it reddens her cheeks, throwing her freckles into relief.

Sansa turns her attention to the basket. “Where did you go?”

“My grandfather brought something with us, that seemed appropriate to the occasion—“

She opens the basket to reveal a cloth filled with blackberries and peaches.

“We came to Winterfell with a shipment of fruit from the south. It’s so hot today, so I went back to the castle and brought us some.”

“Gods be good,” says Sansa. “Thank you.”

She has not eaten fruit in half a year or more.

“My grandfather brought lemons as well, but he already gave them to the cooks. We had heard you like lemon cakes.”

Sansa takes a bite out of a peach and considers.

“Lord Manderly is a generous guest,” she says. “If I hadn’t met your lady mother I would think he intended to wed me to your lord father.”

This makes Wynafryd pause, and Sansa can almost hear her thinking.

“I thought you _were_ married,” she says, “to Tyrion Lannister.”

Sansa closes her eyes and opens them. “I was.”

Before she can stop herself, she tells Wynafryd. “He had our marriage annulled.”

Wynafryd makes an O with her lips and looks away. “ _He_ had it annulled?” 

Sansa is unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “He did.”

It had taken her every ounce of humility she possessed to ask him, in so many words, to resume their marriage, but he-- selfish and proud as he’d always been--had relished the opportunity to throw her rejection of him back in her face, years later. 

And this after she’d lain awake every night as the dead approached Winterfell, asking herself what kind of sensible match she could make to protect her family and the realm. 

Strange, the void left behind. It was as if he—he and the Hound both, really—had each hollowed out in Sansa a place designed for their exclusive use, and then neither had ever come to claim it. And Sansa was left standing with the wounds they’d made.

“Forgive me,” says Wynafryd. “I did not intend to raise a sore subject.”

“It’s alright, marriage is always a subject at court. Perhaps your grandfather means to offer Wylla to my brother Bran? That has been a common theme of late, as well.”

The other woman swallows—Sansa sees the bob in her lovely white throat.

“No,” she admits, inclining her head towards Sansa. “Although he would be interested in that prospect. But that is not the reason we have come.”

Sansa reaches for a handful of blackberries. 

“I look forward to finding out that reason.”

Wynafryd falls silent.

“And your sister will not tempt me into agreeing to it, whatever it is.” 

She flashes Wynafryd a smile. “But you might.”

She expects Wynafryd to smile back— she remembers it from receiving the Manderlys in the great hall, she has a brilliant smile like her sister, but softer, sweeter—and Sansa would like to see it again.

But there is only hurt in her dark eyes.

\--

Lady Wynafryd does not say a word as they trot back to the castle.

Then, as they go to dismount, Wynafryd turns to her and says, “I do not come to you as my grandfather’s pawn, but as a friend.” 

She shakes her head. 

“Or I’d like to be. I brought you the fruit because I thought you’d like it. The gloves, as well.”

Sansa catches her by the arm with one of those gloves before she turns away. 

“Lady Manderly,” Sansa says. “I can be hard. I know I can be. But I would like to be your friend. Come walk with me in the godswood tomorrow.”

This does bring a smile to Wynafryd’s face, not the bright one she’d hoped to see, but the small one, the one that brings warmth to her face. 

“I’d like that, Your Grace.” 

\--

She has been wearing too many dark colors, Sansa realizes. 

The gown of dark blue at the Manderlys’ welcome feast, a brown dress for riding-- it is spring and she is still dressing like it is mid-winter. 

Sansa allows herself to put on a gown of green with pink accents. She stares at herself. She has taken to wearing her hair loose but with this dress that makes her look--somehow, incredibly-- half a child. She pulls half her hair up into braids. 

It’s an improvement. 

She goes down to the godswood before she expects Lady Manderly to arrive. The weirwoods are as red as ever, but the rowans are flowering in cream colors against green leaves, budding by the dozen to a single branch. 

Sansa picks one off the tree. Feeling its softness between her fingers, she wonders that it has taken her this long to visit the godswood. How much time _has_ she passed walled away in her bedchambers? So much she didn’t even know the trees were flowering in the wood. 

“Your Grace,” says Wynafryd Manderly, dropping into a curtsey.

Sansa’s cheeks redden. “Lady Wynafryd. I didn’t see you there.”

“I only just arrived,” says Wynafryd. 

In a dress of cream and gold, she looks almost like one of the trees, her brown hair cascading in a long fall behind her back. 

Sansa offers her an arm, and Wynafryd takes it, stealing a shy glance at Sansa’s face. 

Sansa feels a smile coming up from within, warming her. 

“It is so beautiful, Your Grace,” says Wynafryd. “We lack anything like this in White Harbor.”

“Thank you.”

_My mother and father used to come here to talk_ , she wants to say, but it sounds too intimate to share. 

“Do you not have a weirwood of your own in White Harbor?”

Wynafryd shakes her head. “We keep the Faith of The Seven.”

Sansa laughs. “I imagine you are the one of the only houses in the north who do.”

Wynafryd turns to look at Sansa, the sunlight falling into her blue-green eyes and illuminating them like a flare. 

“Yes, our ancestors came from the Reach.” 

That makes Sansa’s stomach clench, but she smiles through it. 

“That dress is beautiful on you,” she offers. “I think…. My lady… It is almost as if your family has been hiding you away.”

“We are loyal to House Stark,” says Wynafryd. “And my grandfather does love to hold his cards close to his chest for your sake. I have been one of the cards, I am afraid. More than I would have liked to have been.”

Sansa pauses, remembering old Lord Glover. 

“Is he good to you, this husband of yours? Since we were talking of husbands.”

Wynafryd goes still beside her, her face unreadable. 

“As good as any man can be.”

Sansa raises an eyebrow. “Not a ringing endorsement.” 

“No, he is a good, kind man. Truly. He will make a good father to Eawynn.” Wynafryd says. “And he is not a Frey.” 

“That would be a fate worse than death. I hope your grandfather didn’t ask you to consider that.”

“He didn’t ask so much as tell-- but he also didn’t force me to go through with it. He used my betrothal to get close to the Freys, then delivered his fatal stroke.”

Sansa has heard something of that story. 

“Poison,” she says. 

Wynafryd smiles with more than a hint of pride. 

“Yes, Your Grace. I played my part, and I played it willingly.”

What Sansa is learning of Wynafryd is a complicated picture: a woman like many women-- both choosing her own fate and having it chosen for her. The similarities to her own experience are too much for her to ignore. Sansa feels a wave of shame for having insulted the Manderly woman, even unintentionally, the day before. 

“What was it that I said yesterday-- that hurt you?”

Wynafryd’s eyes as she meets Sansa’s gaze are bright and intense. 

“The assumption, Your Grace,” she says. Her tone is sharper than Sansa expected. 

“You thought I was no better than an arm of my grandfather’s ambition. I expected better from you, to be honest.” 

Sansa nettles at that, but she nods her head. 

“You expected I would understand.”

“I did,” says Wynafryd. “I do not know you very well, Your Grace--”

“Call me Sansa.” 

“Sansa,” says Wynafryd, surprise flooding her face. 

“I do not know you very well, Sansa,” she says. “But from what I have seen, you are more than worthy of mine and my family’s loyalty. You are the ruler the north needs.”

_She looks at me and sees the north_ , thinks Sansa, stifling a sense of disappointment. 

“Is that… all you see? When you look at me?” 

Sansa hates the shyness creeping into her voice. 

Wynafryd looks shy as well, her eyes retreating. 

“I would not presume…”

Sansa squeezes Wynafryd’s arm where she is holding it in hers. 

“I am asking you to presume.”

Wynafryd looks back at her. Her smile peeks out of her face, flushing her cheeks. 

“Well, you are also quite tall.”

“Do you-- do you like women, Wynafryd?” 

Sansa’s heart is pounding in her chest. A voice in the back of her mind to rises to offer an opinion-- _unwise_ , the voice says. She quashes it. 

Wynafryd’s face changes. 

“Only the tall ones.”

They have stopped walking and Sansa has rounded to face Wynafryd, their arms still linked. 

“I am not as experienced as my sister,” Wynafryd says. 

She sounds breathless, and this close, Sansa can see the delicate freckles, the fairy-kisses, on her nose and cheeks. 

“I don’t care for experience or no,” says Sansa. 

Wynafryd is looking at her beneath her eyelashes. She is almost as tall as Sansa. 

“Then I would like more experience before I can say.” 

Sansa leans closer. “Like this?”

Wynafryd’s eyelids flutter closed. 

“Like that.”

Sansa closes the distance between them with a kiss. It is a gentle one at first-- a soft press of Sansa’s lips to Wynafryd’s full ones underneath. 

Sansa lets her tongue to dart between those lips, tasting the sweetness there. 

Wynafryd allows her, leaning closer. 

Sansa’s fingertips drift toward that long brown hair. Wynafryd’s eyes are open now, beckoning her onward, but-- no.

Sansa lets her hand fall back, not wanting to push further than Wynafryd has invited her. 

“How was that?” Sansa asks, breaking the kiss.

Wynafryd gives her another blue-green, sunlit glance. Sansa’s hands start trembling. 

“I think I need more time to be sure.”

Sansa clears her throat. 

“Of course.”

She offers Wynafryd her arm again. “Can I escort you back to the castle?”

Wynafryd blushes. “Of-- of course.”

\--

The scent of lemons wafts from the kitchens as Sansa makes her way back to her bedchamber.

_There are the lemon cakes_ , she finds herself thinking. 

It makes her grimace. 

“Lemon cakes and pretty women,” she says under her breath. Her tastes are becoming well-known in the north, then. 

It frightens her. 

Wynafryd frightens her too. She _wants_ her, Sansa knows now. She wants to feel Wynafryd’s smile beneath their kisses, she wants to taste that pretty white neck and every freckle on it.

She wants to take off all of Wynafryd’s lovely dresses and throw them on the floor. 

She hasn’t wanted anyone like this in a while. Sex she can take or leave, as the mood strikes her. But this-- Sansa hears Wynafryd laugh, sees her remarkable eyes, then the sound of her voice, telling Sansa, “I expected better from you” -- this might be beyond sex. 

The thought is terrifying. 

_The more people you love, the weaker you are._

Sansa shakes her head to clear it-- who had told her that?

She pours herself a glass of wine and sprawls out on her bed. 

She should write to Jon. 

Her brother is, nominally, her Hand. It is not traditional to have a Hand in the north, but his name has been a useful reply whenever some craggy old lord makes a remark about a woman running a kingdom. 

She trusts Wynafryd; she believes what the other woman told her in the godswood. But she doesn’t trust that scheming old man with more than an inch of her life. He has studied her too well. 

And if Wyman Manderly wants something from her, he strikes her as the sort who might think twice about that, if he saw Jon Snow standing by her side like a loyal, particularly dour dog. 

But-- no. Something stills her hand over the parchment. 

She doesn’t fear Manderly, not truly. That would be a girl’s fear, not a woman’s, and certainly not a queen’s. 

And besides, she reminds herself, not everyone is an enemy. 

  


\--

The lemon cakes are cut in the shape of direwolves. 

“They are lovely!” Sansa says, holding one up in the light as if to toast Wyman Manderly. 

“The lemons came to me from Braavos, Your Grace,” says Manderly. He is seated to her side, his bulk taking up half the table, with Lord Glover on the other side, and a grandddaughter on each end. 

Sansa tries not to look at Wynafryd too much. What happened between them in the godswood has remained a secret, if Wylla’s frequent lustful glances at Sansa are any indication. 

Still, Wynafryd has put on a gown of light blue summersilk that shows her shoulders, and her hair is half pulled up into a braid, with the other half coming down in waves. Eawynn is in her arms; she and the babe have the same eyes.

Sansa forces her attention back to Lord Manderly. 

His face is lit from the fire-- it is warm during the day, but the nights get cold still, in the spring. 

Amidst the folds of light and shadow on his face, his eyes glitter with wine. He and his men have been drinking for hours this afternoon. Sansa is not sure why, but she does know that she fancies her chances of prying information from a drunk man rather than a sober one. 

Sansa folds her hands and leans forward. 

“Truly I can say in my time as queen we have had no more generous guest than you, Lord Manderly,” she says. 

Lord Manderly nods his head and raises his cup to her. 

“Nor have I known a more welcoming host,” he says. 

“I think we have hosted you before, did we not?”

Sansa’s thoughts of Jon earlier led her to recall his presence at her brother’s coronation, as well as at her own. 

“Aye, you did, for a moment,” says Manderly. “I was there when both you and your brother were crowned.”

He lays down his drink, a fact Sansa notices. 

“If you ask me,” says Manderly, his cheeks flushed and his eyes twinkling. “The second time was better.”

Sansa flushes, not sure what to say. Jon’s brief time as King in the North was a strange episode, one whose effects she was still overcoming. Most of the time, however, the northern lords were effusive with praise for Jon-- though not this one, it seemed. 

“I was wondering where you’d hidden him,” says Manderly. 

Sansa laughs to hide her discomfort. 

“I haven’t hidden him, Lord Manderly. As I am sure you have heard, he killed the Dragon Queen. He is in exile for his crimes.”

“In exile,” Manderly muses. “A true King in the North would not let that stop him from claiming his crown.”

Sansa is at a loss. Privately, she agrees with Manderly. Jon had allowed himself to be maneuvered by the threat of an army that had since long left Westeros’s shores. However, she has come to terms with Jon’s failings and will not voice them to an outsider. 

“Jon did what was necessary for the realm,” she says. “As you know, he is my Hand in any case.”

Manderly smiles mysteriously. “A weak King, makes a weaker Hand.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Sansa sees Wynafryd raise an eyebrow and take a long sip of wine. 

And then Sansa knows-- this is what Manderly has come for. 

He wants Jon’s position as Hand. 

Sansa sits back in her chair. She lets out a breath-- it will be easier now that she knows what he wants. 

She considers the idea. 

Killing Daenerys seems to have rattled Jon. Sansa had written a letter offering the Hand to Jon in the early weeks of her reign, promising to use him primarily for his name and only rarely ask his counsel. He had replied that he would be happy to help in any way he could-- but the reply was strange, almost incoherent. 

She’s heard it said that Jon is draining every cask of ale he can find north of the wall, looking for the queen he killed at the bottom. 

He is one of those things Sansa worries about late at night, after she has worried about everything else. 

If Arya were here Sansa would have dispatched her by now to bring their brother home. But Jon will never leave exile, whether out of some misplaced guilt, or because-- even more worryingly--he seems to obey every word that comes out of Tyrion Lannister’s mouth just as he once obeyed Daenerys. 

“Jon Snow is a follower, not a leader,” says Manderly, watching Sansa’s face. “Why do you need such a man as Hand?”

“I don’t,” says Sansa, changing course. “But he is my brother, and I sense you wish to offer yourself in his place. I will have to think on that. What would you bring to this arrangement, Lord Manderly?”

Manderly sputters on his wine. 

Beside her, Glover laughs. 

The room full of Manderly men has gone quiet to listen to the conversation, but when Glover laughs, many of the men laugh as well. 

There is a new light in Lord Manderly’s eyes when he clears his throat and looks back at her. 

_Respect._

Sansa can’t deny the shiver of satisfaction that runs up her spine-- but just as well. If Manderly wants to try to govern through her, he should know who she is. 

“I bring you trade,” says Manderly, his mouth twitching. “The deepest port in the north. The most thriving markets. Some of the north’s finest craftsmen, as you have no doubt seen.” 

_I would have had all that anyway,_ Sansa thinks, careful not to reveal the thought on her face. Every eye in the room is looking at her, waiting for her reply. 

“I will consider your offer,” she says at last.

And she will. Among all her lords, Manderly is a wealthy, powerful man-- someone she cannot afford to make an enemy of. 

\--

A knock on the door later that night comes to disturb her evening. She is sitting with a book open on her lap and a glass of wine to her side. 

“Who is it?” she asks, her heart pounding. She does not like to be caught unaware, however benign the intrusion.

It is Wynafryd Manderly. She is still wearing the gown from earlier, but she has untied her hair. From the look of her rumpled gown, she has been nursing her child. 

Sansa bids her come in. 

“That was a wise move,” Wynafryd says, without introduction. “My grandfather and his bannermen were not expecting it.”

Sansa raises her eyes to meet Wynafryd’s. 

“Did you know?” She hates the suspicion in her voice, but it creeps in all the same. 

Wynafryd sighs. “I suspected.”

Her doleful dark eyes seek Sansa’s face. 

“This is not the court of King’s Landing, Sansa,” she says softly. “My grandfather and I, we mean you no harm--”

“I was considering granting him what he’s asked for,” says Sansa, cutting her off. “He is old and fat, and I imagine like to die soon. His gratitude means nothing to me, but that of his descendants? That could be quite useful in the days to come.”

Wynafryd’s eyes are glassy in the firelight, and she stares at Sansa. 

“Well, I am glad to be _useful_ to you then.” 

Then Wynafryd stands up, smoothing her dress as though some imaginary dirt had got on it. 

Sansa closes her eyes and rubs her temples, waiting for her to take her leave. Then--

“Wynafryd,” she says suddenly. “How did you get up here?”

Wynafryd looks back at Sansa over her shoulder, biting her lip. 

“One of your kitchen staff showed me.”

_Myla, that would be. Of course._

That kitchen wench had seen a beautiful woman looking for Sansa, and immediately known to send her to Sansa’s bedchambers. 

_Damn her to all seven hells._

Wynafryd is still standing in the doorway wringing her hands. 

“Why are you leaving, Wynafryd?” 

Sansa tries to make her tone gentle-- gentler than it is-- into something that might entice her to stay. 

“I don’t care whether you give it to him,” Wynafryd says in a rush. “I truly don’t. But I will not hear you speak of my blood that way.”

“He is a scheming old man,” she adds. “I know that. I am sure he is a headache for you. But he is my family.”

Sansa stares into the depths of her wine glass. 

“Do you think it was easy for me, earlier, to hear my brother Jon spoken of that way?”

Now it is Wynafryd who wears guilt on her lovely face. She moves back into the room, letting the door swing shut again behind her. 

“I am sorry my grandfather said that.”

“How soon the north forgets what we have endured,” says Sansa, half to Wynafryd, half lost in thought. 

Wynafryd gets on her knees, then, taking Sansa’s hands in her own. 

Sansa can barely see her through a haze that might have been tears.

“Your Grace,” says Wynafryd. “You have given me a great gift, to use your given name, as though we are friends. But I am not sure-- I don’t know if I have earned it.”

“Silly girl,” says Sansa. “You have, or I would not have offered.”

Sansa leans forward and kisses her, holding her face between her hands, taking in every freckle, every glimmer of light in her dark eyes. 

Wynafryd is kissing her back just as deeply. 

Sansa’s fingers twine in her hair; she tips Wynafryd’s head back with the pressure of the kiss, sinking her teeth into that bottom lip. 

Her answering little sighs and moans are making Sansa wet between the legs. 

“Sansa--”

Sansa breaks the kiss with difficulty, leaving them both out of breath. 

“I know,” she says. “You said to wait.”

“Just tell me one thing,” says Wynafryd. 

Her lips are swollen now, her hair disheveled. 

“Ask me anything.”

“What do you see-- when you look at me?” 

Wynafryd’s voice is as tremulous as her gaze is direct. 

“Because there are times when you look at me-- and I think-- it is as if I am not there. Like you are somewhere else.”

Sansa stares for a moment, uncomprehending. Then a ghost rises before her, easily, of another woman with the same thick brown hair and bright eyes, the same spirit and intelligence--

_Sweet girl._

Sansa closes her eyes. 

Part of her wants to send Wynafryd away. The other woman has already said too much. The kinds of things Sansa would never forgive in any other person. 

But another part, a part that sounds alarmingly like her father, says to Sansa: _you owe her the truth._

“You remind me of someone. Someone I loved and cared for. Sometimes it is hard to see her face when I look at you.” 

She waits for a reply and hears silence broken only by breathing. 

She opens her eyes.

Wynafryd is standing now, a terrible expression on her face. 

“Yes,” she says. “I thought as much.”

Wynafryd shakes her head, and Sansa wants to take her by the arm again, to pull her close and kiss her, but she doesn’t. 

“We have Tyrell blood.”

Sansa swallows. 

“I know.” 

Wynafryd smiles sadly. 

“It has been a pleasure getting to know you, Your Grace.”

“Where are you going?” Sansa says, her own voice cracking in her ears like some child’s. 

But she doesn’t mind it-- she only wants Wynafryd to turn around and sit down beside her. 

And Wynafryd does turn for a moment, her dark silhouette hanging in the doorway. 

“I would like to be loved for myself,” she says. “Not for some other woman.”

  
  
  
  


\--

  
  


When she goes, Sansa takes out her knitting needles and begins to make something new. 

\--

\--

  
  


Sansa does not name Lord Manderly as Hand. 

“I must first discuss it with my brother,” she says. “House Stark is grateful for your loyalty, as ever. But we are broken by years of war. We can be suspicious of outsiders, and I would like to persuade my brother, to make him see the value a tie to House Manderly would bring to us and ours.”

Lord Manderly does not look disappointed-- in fact, he seems almost pleased, beneath his mustache. 

Sansa hides her relief. 

She sends him off with hundreds of pies in the shape of mermaids, the blanket she started for Eawynn after that night, a live wolf pup, and five of the royal destriers left behind by the Dragon Queen. 

Then the delegation from White Harbor leaves as slowly and noisily as it came, an ordeal of horses and litters in the mud left behind from the spring rains. 

Yet they too eventually fade into the distance, leaving Sansa with a memory, of the blanket she made for Wynafryd’s daughter Eawynn, clutched in the girl’s tiny fist. 

  


\--

\--

  
  


Sometimes she thinks of Wynafryd. 

The days that follow are long and busy, filled with court business and meetings and letters that she seals with a crowned direwolf. One of them is to Jon. 

At the end of the day, Sansa can’t escape the terrible expression on Wynafryd’s face. 

_I will not hear you speak of my blood that way._

_I would like to be loved for myself._

“You want too much,” Sansa says to herself, before she blows out the candle for the night. 

\--

\--

She decides to go down to the stables one day. 

One of the groups of visitors over the past year has left behind a mare she likes every time she sees her, a dark brown beauty with black eyes-- a creature whose kindness Sansa can feel as soon she touches it. 

“Who is this?” she asks one of the stable-boys.

Dark hair and a sunny smile answer her.

_A stable-_ girl _, then._

“Well, my name is Bryn, Your Grace,” the girl says. 

Sansa smiles at her. 

_So this must be Myla’s love._

“Thank you, Bryn. But I meant-- the horse.”

“I don’t think she has a name yet, Your Grace.”

Sansa looks into the horse’s eyes, stroking its long soft nose. 

“Betha,” Sansa says, thinking of the girl herself. 

Sansa hopes Betha is alright, and Magga too. 

“That’s a good name, Your Grace.”

“Would you teach me to ride her?” Sansa asks, and she means it. 

She is a woman of the north-- and she is no Arya and will never be-- but it befits her to learn to ride, to sit side by side on horseback with the men and women of the North without worrying that she will fall. 

“I’d be happy to, Your Grace.”

Sansa falls quite a lot in those early days, but under Bryn’s forgiving warmth--and Myla’s, who comes to watch and learn too--the sting is not so bad. 

\--

\--

Several months later, Sansa finishes the green-gold dress. 

The final stitch almost stuns her-- its abrupt finality. 

She has been working on the dress for the better part of a year, now-- its creation occupied her during those first uncertain months of her reign and continued to the present day, where Queen Sansa rules, unchecked and unchallenged, without a man by her side, over a kingdom that hasn’t seen peace like this since Ned Stark lived in Winterfell. 

Sansa cannot quell the swell of pride that starts in her when she holds the gown up to the light. 

It tinkles gently as she moves the fabric-- hundreds of beads sewn into the dress glimmer in the sunlight. 

It is a stunning gown. All it wants is someone to wear it. 

Sansa holds it up to her body in the mirror. 

_It complements my hair_ , she thinks. 

She puts it on, then she goes to sleep in the afternoon sun for a very long time. 

\--

\--

  
  


When she sleeps she has a dream. 

She is in the godswood with a woman, hearing her laughter, seeing her eyes brighten and darken under the springtime light. Sansa takes her hand and kisses the woman on her reddened mouth, putting all of her joy, all of her pain, into one kiss. 

And the woman kneels before her, and they both lie down together, in the grass under the weirwood trees. 

Sansa removes one strap of the woman’s gown, and then the other. She kisses both collarbones, sucking gently on her neck. 

The woman’s body stirs in pleasure beneath Sansa. 

Sansa unties the woman’s bodice, letting it fall open. Then she kisses the dark pink nipples underneath, until they harden under her tongue. Sansa finds the warm wet place between her thighs with her hand, kissing her on the neck, the breasts, on the freckled skin of her ribcage and on her fleshy hips. In the dream there is neither shame nor fear. 

_Sweet girl,_ says Sansa, in the dream. 

_Do you love me?_

_Do you trust me?_

The woman sighs in reply. 

_I love you._

_I trust you._

The woman’s brown hair is so familiar to Sansa it brings waves of grief to her heart. 

Then when she is done, when the woman lies spent beneath her, her face shining with release, she opens her eyes and Sansa sees her for the first time-- truly sees her. 

Wynafryd Manderly looks at Sansa with blue-green eyes. 

\--

\--

  


When she wakes up she goes to her desk to draft a letter, nearly knocking over the ink in her haste to write. 

_Dear Wynafryd,_

_I know I said so many things that hurt you. You said things that hurt me too. I’ve been unable to do anything but think of our time together since you left, to imagine what I should have said, or what you should have said, or what we should have done, to have it all turn out differently. I don’t see a dead woman when I look at you. I promise. I see the person you are, strong and kind-- an intriguing person whom I would like to know better._

_But sometimes-- and you will have to learn to forgive me, as I will have to learn to forgive you-- the past like a wave comes to claim me. And yet always without fail I shall wash up again, on the shores of the present. Forgive me my wanderings. They have nothing to do with you. Forgive me my fears as well, and I shall forgive yours._

_Let us talk together. Let us see how we can fix what happened between us, and let us learn differently. May we learn to let go of the past. I am ready for that, aren’t you?_

_Yours truly,_

_Sansa Stark_


End file.
